New Love
by Ronja-R
Summary: Set a few weeks after the end of MJ (before the epilogue). Katniss spends a morning exploring Peeta.


This must be by far the most graphic thing I've written... Not really my usual style but it was kind of an experiment. Also, I've never really written "honeymoon phase" Katniss more than in passing and I thought it would be fun to do so. There's not exactly any plot to this one-shot, just an early morning with Katniss and Peeta in bed together.

* * *

I wake up maybe half an hour before dawn. I'm not sure what it was that woke me. Perhaps some noise from outside reaching us through the open window. Perhaps just my own body having had enough of sleep for the moment. Whatever the reason I feel content when I wake, which is very rare for me. If I'm roused from sleep while it's still dark out then it usually has to do with a nightmare and more often than not I feel anything but peaceful. The serenity that fills me this morning is very welcome and I let out a content sigh in the darkness.

My head rises and falls slightly with each breath of the boy whose chest serves as my pillow. I can hear the steady beating of Peeta's heart and feel his warmth even though the t-shirt I'm wearing. He's on his back, fast asleep, his face turned slightly to the left. He sleeps in boxer briefs and nothing more so my head is resting against his bare skin. Skin that is marred by skin grafts and scars but still precious to me. In an odd way I like that his scars are visible and that they haven't been removed the way they were after the arena. It's like a confirmation that we no longer have to pretend and put up a facade. We can be ourselves, the scarred individuals that we are. We're a matching set, to boot. I've got my own skin grafts and scars and carry with me the same inner wounds from battle as he does.

I tilt my head upward somewhat and smile slightly as I watch him sleep. I suppose he is my boyfriend now, though we've not put to words what we are to one another these days. It's been three weeks since kissing turned to fumbling, tentative lovemaking after which, when Peeta asked, I told him that me loving him was real. And it is. It's real and it's slightly overwhelming and once the confession had been made there was no taking it back. Things changed in that moment and I had been afraid of that for so long. The changes turned out to be good, though. Perhaps sensing that I'm still not ready to move too fast too soon Peeta hasn't pressed for more. He knows now that his feelings are reciprocated and that seems to be more than enough to make him happy right now. He doesn't ask anything of me that I'm not ready to give him. I think he feels those things are worth so much more if I give them to him on my own accord, without prodding. It makes sense that he should feel this way after how much the Capitol expected me to give to him back when I wasn't ready to. I was going to give him myself in marriage and at first I didn't understand why that made Peeta upset. Even after Haymitch explained that he wanted it to be real I didn't quite grasp his reaction. I do now. I want Peeta to be with me but I want him to be because he wants to. Having lost his love after the hijacking I can now understand about wanting the person you love to be with you out of choice. If he was with me now out of pity or out of loneliness or for any other reason than that he loves me back I would not want it.

For the past three weeks we have kissed, touched, made love. We've talked, but only at surface level about our feelings. I haven't seen much need to discuss it. It was through my actions in bed that night that Peeta knew I love him and my behaviour around him now tells him all he needs to know. Sooner or later we will talk, talk at length probably, spell out our emotions and say everything we've been dying for the other person to know. I will tell Peeta how deep down I knew I was in love with him when we were in the second arena. I will tell him how much I thought about him when he was Snow's prisoner and how I pressed his pearl to my lips imagining I was kissing him. I will explain how great my happiness was when he had been rescued and how grand my daydreams were of how our reunion would go and what we would do afterward and I will try as best as I can to make him understand how my heart broke when he no longer loved me. I hope I can make him see that my treatment of him in the weeks that followed came from that heartbreak. I will tell him how my heart couldn't stop caring for him even when I believed there was no hope. I will tell him how I waited for him to come back to me after I returned to Twelve and how my life seemed to be on hold until he did.

I hope Peeta will tell me how his feelings for me came back. I've been wondering if he did fall out of love with me as a result of the hijacking and if he then came to fall for me all over again. If so I want to hear him tell me how that happened. I want to hear the boy I love tell me how he came to love me again. He might tell me that his feelings never truly did go away, that they remained buried deep down somewhere even when he hated me the most. Maybe one of the reasons why the hijacking worked so well at first and made him so determined to kill me was that they couldn't make him stop loving me entirely and he couldn't handle loving someone he thought was a mutt trying to destroy him. Hating someone you love is far too draining and can really mess with you.

Sooner or later we will also put labels on what we are to one another. Boyfriend and girlfriend seems like the appropriate words but those terms seem so... inadequate. For some reason they don't seem to be enough to encompass what we are. This is not a traditional relationship and to try and sort out everything we have been and how much of it has been real can really make your head spin. To refer to Peeta as my boyfriend seems to downplay it all so much. Then again, for all I know that feeling could be normal. Maybe everyone in this early stage of confessed mutual love feels that boyfriend and girlfriend could not nearly describe the essence and depth of their relationship. For the time being though I will refrain from using that term for him. He's my Peeta, simple as that.

Right now my Peeta is sleeping peacefully, his face relaxed and his curly hair in disarray. I study his face as dawn slowly begins to light the room, making his features more clearly visible. My eyes trail across his strong jaw, the hint of a cleft in his chin, the light stubble on his cheeks. You can barely even see it but I know that if I reach up to caress him or kiss him I will feel it scratch me. I look at his mouth, thinking of how good his lips feel pressed against my own. How good they feel when they caress me elsewhere on my body or close around my nipple. My eyes follow the line of his nose and take in his eyelids, wishing I was looking into his eyes right now.

Suddenly I long for him to open his eyes and look at me. I want to hear his voice, want him to acknowledge my existence, want to see him be happy that I am here. My eyes leave his face and travel down to his bare chest. There are two patches of blonde curly hair growing there, one on his right pectoral and one down by his bellybutton. I can't see the latter from where I lay but I know it's there. I've let my hand trail over it a number of times. My hand, which has been resting on his collarbone while I slept, slowly travels downward and I lift myself up ever so slightly to place a kiss over his heart.

He flinches a little in his sleep, aware of the touch but no more than that. I chuckle slightly and place an open mouthed kiss on the same spot. He grunts lightly but stays asleep. Slowly I move my face up his chest, placing a trail of kisses as I go. This wakes him up and I settle back down to where I was laying before when he stirs and slowly opens his eyes. For a moment he seems confused as to where he is and what's going on but then he looks down at me and I feel a pleasant jolt go through my body when our eyes meet.

"Hey" he says hoarsely. "What time is it?"

"Just past dawn" I answer, placing a third kiss over his heart.

"What's wrong?" he asks, brow wrinkled in concern.

"Nothing's wrong."

"Did you have a nightmare?"

"Nothing's wrong" I say again, letting my hand run back up his chest. "I just missed you."

He looks confused for a moment, still half asleep. Something about the look on his face is adorable to me and I laugh a little, a happy laugh, and move up his body until our faces are in level with each other. I grin at him, probably looking completely foolish but I don't care one bit. I'm happy and I want to enjoy that feeling and I want him to be happy too. I want to be able to make him happy just as he is able to make me so.

"I love you" I say.

Something happens in his eyes when I say those words. I can't quite put my finger to what it is but it seems like it could be both awe and disbelief. I give him a kiss to underline my words and then I give him another grin.

He just looks at me in return, brushing the hair from my face with his hand. He definitely doesn't look displeased but he's not grinning back at me either. I feel a strong urge to kiss him repeatedly until he's smiling as widely as I am and I long for the hunger I know those kisses would bring. There's another desire coursing through me too. A desire to make Peeta feel the way he makes me feel. He's an attentive lover, always making sure I enjoy it, treating my body in a way that brings the word _worship_ to mind. It's been that way every time we've had sex. Peeta takes the lead, Peeta makes sure I enjoy it, Peeta makes me feel things I never understood could exist. He enjoys it too, that much I know without a doubt, but it has crossed my mind several times that he always seems to put the focus on me. Even when I try to take initiative and to touch him and focus all the attention on him he somehow manages to swiftly turn things around and make it all about me.

I don't want him to do that today.

"Peeta..." I breathe, the smile on my face replaced with a much more serious expression as my index finger lightly traces the lines of his lips. "I want... to know your body." I swallow, feeling awkward even talking about sex. We don't really do that yet. I don't know how to put my wishes into words without blushing and stuttering and feeling unable to look at him. Unless it's in the heat of the moment and I'm moaning for him not to stop or to do more or to keep going.

"You've known my body for three weeks now" answers Peeta, sounding a little awkward as well and like he's not entirely sure what I'm talking about.

"I want to know your body like you know my body" I say, slowly moving back down his chest. I think about how he has explored me with his mouth and his hands and his eyes, how he likes to experiment and try different touches and techniques to see what gets the most favourable reaction from me, how he is able to find sensitive spots I never even knew I had. I want to know all the sensitive spots on his body and how to stimulate them. "I want to know your body better than I know my own."

He looks at me with disbelief mixed with lust and doesn't protest as I begin to place open mouthed kisses down his chest. I let my fingers graze over his nipples and, wondering if they are sensitive too, like mine, I let my mouth and fingers play with them, trying to recall exactly how Peeta attends to mine. His response is favourable but not as strong as how I respond to him attending to my breasts.

I shift my body to lie between his legs and slowly edge further down, kissing as I go. When I'm face to face with his crotch I grab the hem of his underwear and without stopping to think or second guess myself I pull on them. Peeta lifts his hips off the bed and helps me to take them off. Now he's buck naked and I'm inches away from his manhood.

Funnily enough I'm not blushing or feeling awkward. The morning after our first time I could barely bring myself to look at his naked body because feeling him inside of me and actually seeing what he looks like are two different things and I wasn't sure I was ready for the latter. His naked physique actually fascinates me a little this morning. I've always felt the male penis is a ridiculous looking organ and right now Peeta's is somewhere in-between flaccid and fully erect which probably should look rather comical. Instead I find it intriguing. In our first arena when I was undressing him to tend to his wounds he said he didn't care if I saw him and at the time I wrote it off as him being too sick to care. In the past weeks I've been thinking that maybe he simply wasn't ashamed of his naked body. Peeta has always been more comfortable in his own skin than me and from what I can tell he has nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to size, though I've only seen a handful of naked men and nobody but him erect so I can't tell if he's normal sized or large. It doesn't matter much. I like it the way it is, regardless of how it compares to other men's.

I wrap my hand around him, earning me a small grunt of approval. I don't look up at his face, focusing instead on the part of him that's wrapped in my hand. I've had my hand on him before but never with my face this close. I realize I have a slight smile on my face as I study him more closely, registering every line, every vein, the exact shape and texture. My hand moves up and down and I hear Peeta breathing slowly, deeply, making very few sounds but seeming happy with what I'm doing. On a sudden impulse I lean in and place a wet kiss on his tip.

He makes a strangled noise and bucks off the bed. I wasn't quite expecting that and I lift my head and look up at him.

"Sorry" he gasps.

What's he sorry for? He lifts himself up on his elbows and reaches his hand down and I get the distinct feeling that he's about to suggest we put the focus on me instead which provokes me in a good way. It's almost like it awakens my competitive streak. Before he can say or do anything I lean down again and take him into my mouth, as much as I can fit of him at once. I keep my eyes locked at him and enjoy the strangled cry he gives and how his eyes squeeze shut and his head tips back. This is my turn to focus all on him. His only job right now is to lie back and let me know what he enjoys and what he wants me to do. Drawing inspiration from how he pleasures me I suckle at him and move my tongue around and he drops back down on the mattress and one of his hands flies up to his brow.

I don't know how long we keep at it. I often take pauses, at first to ask him if he wants me to do this or that or what feels good or not but after a while I begin to pause because I notice that when he's close to the brink and I stop that pulls him away. He seems to grow more and more frustrated each time I do that and I find myself enjoy it immensely. I can feel his skin becoming coated in sweat and I'm starting to get really warm as well so the next time I pause I sit up and grab my t-shirt, pulling it over my head. Peeta looks at me appreciatively and moves to sit up and touch me but with both hands I push him back down and then settle in again between his legs. I don't know what's come over me but I know there's no way I'm letting him turn this into focusing on me.

I've never experienced power in this way before. To have such complete control over another person, in a _good_ way, is a thrilling feeling. Just with my hands and mouth I am able to make his face contort in a way that I find glorious, make him produce sounds that are like music to my ears, make him feel absolutely fantastic. I love having that power over him. I can't get enough of it. The only thing that doesn't work so smooth is that my teeth scrape against him every now and then and he doesn't like that at all even though he only complains the first time. I can't quite seem to figure out how to prevent that from happening but I'm determined to figure it out, if not right now then some other time.

I don't know how long we've been at this, or if it's even been that long at all, when Peeta gazes at me with eyes dark with lust, once more lifting himself up on his elbows.

"Katniss" he whimpers, the way he's saying my name sending pleasant chills down my spine. "This... This is so... Is this really real?"

The question is rhetorical but I find myself giving a "_mmm-hm_" in reply nonetheless. The vibrations of my mouth finally send Peeta over the edge and I am not at all prepared when my mouth suddenly fills with his fluids. He's bucking off the bed, thrashing a little, moaning a curse word. I pull back and, not knowing what else to do, spit out what I can on the sheets. Then his body seems to relax and he covers his eyes with his arm, mumbling an apology. To stop him from worrying that he's done something to displease me I take him in my hand and wrap my lips around him again, earning me a drawn-out moan. Figuring he might be really sensitive right now I let my mouth and tongue caress him very softly and gently until he's begun to grow limp in my mouth.

He's still trying to catch his breath when I move up his body and lay myself down on top of him, the top of my head resting just below his chin. One of his hands finds its way into my hair and massages my scalp while the other runs up and down my arm. I feel happy, relaxed and completely content. In fact, I feel quite proud of myself for having been able to make him respond like that. The sexual power I held over him was exhilarating and I'm on a bit of a high from it.

"We are definitely doing that again" I tell him.

"You're amazing" breathes Peeta in response. "Just amazing..."

I smile happily, nuzzling closer to him as I reach both my arms up and wrap them gently around his head. We lay like that for a while, not saying anything, just enjoying the closeness. Peeta's hands keep caressing me gently and I'm so content I'm almost purring. I don't even realize that I'm slowly moving my body up and down him, rubbing my crotch against his, until I feel him start to harden. With a little laugh I stop moving and shift my arms so that I can lift myself up a bit and look down on him. He smiles back at me and lifts both hands to move my by now rather tangled hair away from my face.

"Really?" I say teasingly. "Ready to go again? Already?"

He shrugs with a grin.

"The girl I love is practically naked and grinding into me" he then says, giving my bottom a light smack. "What did you expect?"

"I am not grinding!" I protest half-heartedly.

"Well whatever it is you're doing it feels nice."

He grabs me and rolls us over so that I am underneath him. I expect him to kiss me or to reach down and remove my underwear but all he does is look at me with so much love that it makes me feel almost choked up. I feel a sudden and intense sense of belonging, that Peeta is mine and I am his and that it's moments like these that we were made for. Not for Hunger Games or rebellions or the gritty reality of life in the districts. It's a crazy thought and a fleeting one. Nobody was meant to only live in moments like these. That doesn't mean I don't want for it to be true. Can't Peeta and I just retreat to this world and stay in it forever? Can't we get to stay here, in bed, never having to step outside this room and deal with the loss of loved ones and our own innocence and everything bad and hurtful in the world?

"You're lovely" says Peeta. "What you said when you woke me up was lovely. Even better than what you did afterward."

It takes a second for me to catch up but then I understand what he's talking about. This morning was the first time I said the actual words "_I love you_" to him. I guess there is a benefit to talking sometimes because it's clear to me that no matter how much I've shown him how I feel over the last three weeks, hearing me actually speak the words really meant something special.

"I'm glad you liked it" I answer, the hint of a teasing smirk on my face. "Both what I said and what I did. You're going to be experiencing a lot of both."

"Well, if you really want to then I'm not going to deny you" he says magnanimously, causing me to laugh. Then his face turns a bit more serious but still loving and he caresses my cheek with his thumb. "Seriously, though. That whole thing was absolutely incredible."

"I love you" I tell him, kissing him softly.

"I love you too" he answers. "And I much enjoy this new side of you."

"Show me how much."

He doesn't need to be told twice. As we kiss hungrily I allow myself to imagine what life could be like. If it can feel this way when we are together, if I can be this happy even though I've lost so much and suffered so terribly, then there might be an actual chance at a future worth living for.


End file.
